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We have been hard at work even though the blog has been quiet.

Building a house with no previous experience is a lot of hard work, both physically and mentally. You spend long hard days doing physical labour and then when you get home its time to get stuck into books, internet and youtube to figure out what comes next and how you are going to do it. Its one long learning process.

My initial idea for the blog was that I was going to do more “how to” videos and quickly realised that this wasn’t going to be possible. Its too difficult to film, edit, upload while you also have to learn to build and build. The filming tends to get in the way. I shoot mainly on a small point and shoot camera and so cant just set it up and leave it filming while I get on with it. That wouldn’t be all that interesting anyway and would mean hours of sorting through footage and editing which I just don’t have the energy for.

I have been filming bits and bobs as I go along and am now going to make an effort to try and post an update every week or two. When most of the building is complete I have the intention to make some more in detail write ups and videos on our building process.

So what has been going on at Ca’n Mandala?

Lime Plastering

Base Coats

We have almost all of the walls finished with a base coat. The only room left to do base coats on is the master bathroom which has been our bedroom up until now. That bathroom will be the last room to get finished as we are currently working on the smaller guest bathroom so that we can get in this winter.

Insulated Lime Plaster

As we aren’t going to be able to insulate and finish the outside of the building this winter we decided to do an insulated lime plaster on the north walls of the house. In the winter, this will keep the heat in the house and the cold out. I will upload a video on that some time soon.

Lime Plaster – Finish Coats

We have the finish coats done on the big walls in the living room and the kitchen. We got two guys that were recommended to us by the place we get our lime from(Unicmall) to do the big walls and they did an excellent job!

Pic of the boys in action:

Here is a quick video on that:

On the second floor where we have done the insulated plaster, we have decided that in order to get in sooner we would just lime wash the base coat. We might apply a finish coat later on when most of the more important things have been done.

Trial and Error

We have also done a finish coat in the bedroom where the wardrobe will be. This was a test to see how this fine finish coat would go on. Unfortunately we started doing this just when it started to get really hot.

Lime plaster needs to “set” or harden slowly, if it sets too fast then it doesn’t “carbonate” and it just powders off the wall. This is especially true of thin finish coats that are only 1 or 2 mm thick. It was 40 degrees C the day we wanted to do it and so it was setting so fast that it was turning to powder and not letting us polish it. The plaster we had chosen was a type of stucco or polished lime finish, but the conditions made it impossible to finish properly. Luckily, we did do a trial run inside the wardrobe before going on to do this process on one of the main walls in the house.

It has actually dried a lot lighter than you see in the pic and doesn’t look bad.

Here are some colour tests that we did to choose a colour for a wall in the living room.

Floor is Tiled!

Last weekend we got the floor tiled in most of the house and it looks amazing! It has really changed everything and being able to live at the finca has suddenly become a reality. With the dirty, dusty lime slab it all seemed a little far away still but now we are getting very close!

Terrace

We have finally covered the water tank and now have a lovely terrace!

There have been a few other things going on which I will cover in my next post.

If you would like to keep up to date on new videos and posts then please subscribe to our blog and youtube channel. Keep an eye on our youtube channel as I often upload videos there but dont make a post about them here.

I will try and write a post every other week and hopefully in the not too distant future I will be able to give a little back to the internet community which has helped me so much along this journey by doing some “how to” videos.

If you have any specific questions then please leave them in the comments and I will try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Its been a long time coming, but its finally here!

We have started plastering!

We have done the first layer of plaster on some of the walls. Our walls are anything but flat so it will take a couple of layers to get it looking…. rustic..

After a lot of research, a couple of courses and lots of umm’ing and ahh’ing we have decide to go with a base layer of lime and very fine gravel known locally as “cero”.

Benefits of Using Lime Instead of Cement

Our walls are made of a very porous sandstone (called “mares”) that acts like a sponge and sucks up water. If you cover this stone with a non breathable material (like cement)it will end up getting saturated, rotting and the result will be large parts of your plaster falling off.

Lime plaster is breathable, meaning that it lets vapour pass through it. This allows your walls to regulate not only the amount of humidity in the actual wall itself, but also the level of humidity in the room. So, in theory we shouldn’t have the typical humidity problems that plague old houses on the island.

Another great benefit of lime is that its antibacterial and anti-fungal and so its a lot harder for mold and any other unwanted fungus’s and bacteria to grow in rooms that are plastered with it.

Lime is also thought to be more “eco” friendly as it takes less energy to make and emits less CO2 into the atmosphere than cement. In the long run it actually absorbs more CO2 (from the atmosphere as it “carbonates”, which is the process which makes lime harden) than is used to make it.

Here are a couple more pics:

Master Bedroom

Kitchen/Front Door

Its really nice to have some of the walls plastered as you can start to see glimpses of the house emerging from the barn.

If you are interested in learning how to plaster with lime and clay, Miquel Ramis does a 2 day course here on the island which is very good and cheap too! He also speaks very good English for those of you with Spanish problems.

We saved a lot of money by going on that course as before it we were going to buy all of our plaster “ready made” and now we are making it ourselves at a fraction of the cost.